Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  “I know, I know,” I told her. “I should have smartened myself up a bit.”

  She didn't actually say yes, you're right, but she looked it. I had to admire her. She'd been working half the night, then out to see me in the early hours, and here she was back at her desk, not caring about sleep when there was a story to cover. She still looked tired, but she'd done something to her hair, twisting it up on top of her head and skewering it with what looked like a hatpin. Jane is aware that she works in an open-plan office. It's one of the secrets of her success. She is always on show.

  I filched a chair from the desk behind Jane's and rolled it over to sit next to her. A television monitor hung from a bracket on the ceiling, showing Corporation news output. Jane's underlings wouldn't be in until later that day, and the desks in front of her were empty, but people working on earlier programs were occupying desks around the edges of the room. I felt more at home here, where at least fifty percent of the workforce was wearing jeans. I couldn't vouch for it, but some of them may even have borne traces of their children's breakfast.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to apologize for shouting at you about Adam.”

  “Accepted. So what are you really doing here?”

  “I went to see Maeve. She offered me a job.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows.

  “EGIE. Ethical guidelines implementation editor.” I was keeping my voice low. For all I knew people high and low were fighting for the job.

  “A poisoned chalice,” Jane murmered back. “In fact a great big vat of arsenic.”

  “Quite.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think? Turn it down.”

  Jane pulled a face and leaned close to me. “No one's job is safe,” she said, “not even Maeve's. You may not be able to pick and choose.”

  I started to ask her more but she shook her head, indicating with her eyes that this was not the time or place.

  “Later,” she insisted. “But to get back to my original question, what are you doing here?”

  “Paula Carmichael,” I changed the subject. “What are they saying?”

  “Too early to draw any conclusions. That's the police. Shocked and saddened by the loss of a true friend, that's the prime minister thinking she's probably more use to him dead than alive. Meanwhile everyone else is speculating wildly.”

  Jane was tapping at her keyboard, summoning up the agency copy on Paula Carmichael. I read over her shoulder and learnt quite a bit: That Paula Carmichael was forty-nine when she died. That Richard Carmichael, aged fifty-six, was the stepfather of the boys, that Paula Carmichael's first marriage had ended in divorce. That Richard Carmichael had also been married before, and that his American wife had alleged he had beaten her, and that she was an alcoholic. That Paula and Richard had met at a government-sponsored seminar on the social responsibilities of business enterprises. That Paula's social activism frequently took her far away from home. That one of the sons, George, had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a football match. That their Lambeth house was worth at least a million pounds, but that Richard had lost close to that gambling on the stock market. That Paula Carmichael's former husband was now living in Aix-en-Provence and running a café with a new wife. All this, I guessed, must have been collated from library clippings. Editors had just summoned up the Paula Carmichael file and reworked the news stories that had come up in the past two or three years since she became well known. There hadn't been sufficient time for anyone to do any proper digging.

  “But nothing that tells us why she jumped …” I murmured.

  “So she did jump?” Jane seized on my terminology.

  I shook my head, irritated. “I don't know. I've told you, I didn't see.”

  “Looks to me like they've got the husband lined up as the killer.”

  Jane looked at the television set and tapped my arm to make me look too. It took me a second, because Gladstone Road looked fresh and new, and not like where I lived at all. Then I realized they were showing the front of the Carmichael house, and that there were photographers blocking the road outside. Whoever was filming must be standing right outside my front door. Even inside it perhaps.

  “Shit,” I muttered. I wondered how my mother was coping.

  As we watched, the door to the Carmichael house opened, and Richard appeared. A man emerged and stood behind his right shoulder, a police officer I guessed. He wore a nondescript gray suit and his dark hair could have done with a brush, but even on television you could see his eyes were busy, watching constantly, moving from the faces in the crowd to the faces of his uniformed officers, who in turn kept glancing at him. Next to the gray-suited police officer, Carmichael was physically vast but he seemed to have shrunk into himself, and when he spoke there was hurt and anger in his voice.

  “I have a statement here asking for help with the police inquiries into the death of my wife, Paula.” He flourished a piece of paper and cameras flashed. He cleared his throat. “But I'm going to tear it up and tell it how it is.” At this point the gray-suited man beside him briefly closed his eyes, and I could have sworn he was praying.

  “I know you British all think I should shut up and grieve. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that bull, but I'm a loudmouth American, and I say it how it is. My wife was the best thing I ever saw about this country. By a long way. And you're all a bunch of ungrateful bastards. You won't let anyone rise above you. You just have to knock them down.” Carmichael raged on, and the journalists loved it, pressing in close with microphones, photographers jostling each other. I spotted at least three uniformed officers looking expectantly at the gray-suited man, waiting for him to put a stop to it. But he just gazed into the middle distance, apparently letting the unorthodox press statement wash over him, which wasn't perhaps as stupid as it looked. I doubt anything could have stopped Carmichael in midflow, and it would have been an unsightly scene to have the police physically restraining the widower. Carmichael ranted on.

  “Some months ago my wife was making a documentary commissioned by the Corporation about her work, and all they wanted to do was dig the dirt. They had no respect. They just wanted to humiliate her, and she began to doubt herself and everything she had done. Ever since, she started to talk about retiring from public life, about stopping her work. Now this. She's gone now, so are you happy?”

  He stopped short then, as though he was going to say more, but changed his mind. Within a moment he had turned and vanished again inside the house. The journalists surged forward. One, a young woman, tried to slide into the house through the open door, only to find her way blocked by the gray-suited man. He nodded politely at her, stepped smartly into the house himself, and shut the door in her face. I heard a guffaw of laughter from somewhere in the crowd of hacks. For a moment the television screen went black, and then the coverage switched back to the studio.

  I felt dizzy and the picture on the screen blurred in front of my tired eyes. I had a sense that something was deeply wrong, that I found myself at the heart of something in which I had no part.

  “Now there's a wee gem for the EGIE,” Jane snorted.

  “Then it's someone else's problem,” I replied.

  “What's someone else's problem?” The voice came from behind my shoulder, and I turned to find Suzette there, eyes bright, her head cocked interrogatively.

  “Everything.” I grinned at her. We hugged and her delicate frame felt tiny against me. I fancied I could even feel her heart beating, like a bird's. “Everything is someone else's problem. I thought you didn't work here anymore.”

  “I won't have anything to do with her,” Jane muttered, teasing, still gazing at the TV monitor. “She's a traitor. I don't know how you can hug the wee thing.”

  “I had a meeting,” Suzette explained, “so I thought I'd drop by, see if Jane was here to say hello. Don't ask me why, I suppose I just felt the need to be abused. You're the last person I expected to see.”

 
We left Jane there, grumbling that it was all very well for those who had no work to do, and we headed out of the building and walked until we found a coffee shop.

  “It's twelve,” Suzette pointed out. “That's lunchtime.”

  For someone so tiny, she eats like a horse. So we ordered coffee, and then we ordered baguettes. Suzette slipped out of her coat, a lithe body with a dancer's poise. Her blond hair was scraped back from her porcelain features and she was dressed in black as she almost always was, a tight sweater over a full skirt, ready to step like a swan into any corps de ballet. She bent to brush some crumbs from her chair and managed to make it look like an elegant thing to do. When she speaks she uses her delicate hands for emphasis. It makes whatever she says sound like music. She has the personality of a diva too. She is capable of relaxing, but only when there is no alternative.

  “You look great,” she said, sitting down, pulling her chair close.

  “You're kidding,” I laughed.

  “You look great considering, put it like that then,” she said, smiling. Suzette was busy, just as Jane was, but she had found time to drop by many times over the past year. She had helped with the children once in a while and never came empty-handed: nothing over the top, just a bottle of wine here and there, perfume for my birthday, fancy soap, little things that helped me to feel human.

  “And how have you been?” Sometimes I felt guilty. My own life was so full that I tended to forget Suzette had her own challenges.

  Jane, Suzette, and me. We had worked our way up through the Corporation ranks together. Somehow the three of us had bonded like iron and what had started off with shared lunches in the canteen became once-monthly dinners that lasted for hours and had us all talking about our lives and our work in a way I believe none of us did with anyone else. If we'd been more alike it probably wouldn't have worked, but Jane's arrogance was somehow balanced out by Suzette's self-doubt, and when Suzette's cool logic was too much for us, then Jane would start giggling, and that would be an end of that. Whenever we were together the conversation bounced around and went to interesting places. Strangely, we did better as a threesome than in any combination of two.

  “Well, I'm busy,” she said, stirring sugar into her coffee, “but I'm getting by.”

  She was the only one of the three of us who'd been gutsy enough to break away from the Corporation. Jane had stayed inside the organization and had become the editor of Controversies, while Suzette and I had both added camera skills to our production training. With the new generation of 3-chip cameras that produce broadcast-quality footage from machines that weigh in at just over three pounds, a lot of our work was done without the traditional camera crew. I'd stayed inside the Corporation too, but Suzette had always been less tolerant of bureaucracy, and had never known how to fight her battles. She had always needed to be her own boss, and her own production company seemed to have given her the freedom she needed. “But tell me about last night.”

  “Oh.” I hung my head, reluctant to bring it all back. For a moment there I had been enjoying the pleasure of meeting Suzette. “There's nothing really to tell. It was just awful.”

  “Well, I mean, you saw her fall, right, so what did you see?”

  I gazed at her. Suzette, Jane, myself—we all spend our lives with images. It's how we think.

  “I saw her falling through the air, fast, and landing and crumpling.” I shrugged. “It was over in an instant.”

  “Was there anyone else there?” Suzette's eyes were fixed on my face, mesmerized.

  Always the same questions, I thought. Why was it that no one else in the world seemed to consider that Paula Carmichael might have committed suicide.

  “I didn't see anyone.”

  Suzette nodded, thinking.

  “But you heard arguments in the street.”

  “That's getting so blown out of proportion,” I objected. “There was some row going on in the early evening. Everyone heard it, they must have. Then I may have heard voices again around the time she died, and then again I may not have. There was a storm, it was noisy, it was probably my imagination.”

  Suzette caught my tone of exasperation.

  “Sorry, I didn't mean to interrogate you.” She backed off. “It's just that I knew her slightly, so it's … well, it's just all rather strange …”

  “I didn't realize you knew her.”

  “Only slightly,” she repeated, and sniffed. In Suzette's vocabulary that small, controlled sniff meant that she did not intend to expand on this.

  “You sound as though you didn't like her.” I was surprised. “I thought everyone loved her.”

  “Including Paula,” Suzette said drily. She stopped for a moment, then changed the subject. “Look, I'm going to have to run because I have an appointment, but I was going to ring you anyway. I heard you're thinking of going back to work, and I wondered whether you'd be interested in joining me at Paradigm.”

  I stared, and she grinned at me, delighted at my surprise.

  “We've had some teething problems, mostly financial, but I really believe they're over now, and I can't think of anyone I'd rather work with.”

  “It's certainly worth thinking about.” I struggled for words.

  “So think about it. Let me see, how about more food, let's say a working lunch on Monday?”

  “Okay,” I said slowly.

  “And look,” Suzette said, “I know things are tough. If you need anything, just let me know. Babysitting, whatever.”

  “Right,” I said, smiling at the earnest look on Suzette's face. “Thanks,”

  Chapter 4

  AFTER Suzette left, I went and bought myself some makeup and a potion that promised me shiny hair. I retired to the washroom to try to make myself presentable. Then I did Jane's interview for her. I kept it as low-key as possible, no dramatics. After I came out of the studio Jane forced a smile and told me it was “Great, perfect, just what we needed,” but I can smell Corporation bullshit a mile off and I knew she was disappointed. With any luck, I thought, I would end up on the cutting-room floor. Still, I spent the rest of the day feeling sick at myself, as if I'd been filming pornography, not an interview for a news analysis program. I should have just taken what I had seen the night before and wrapped it up and locked it away in my head. What good did recycled death ever do anyone?

  By the time I'd got home from the Corporation there was a thin but steady stream of people coming by to take a look at where Paula Carmichael had fallen. There were journalists staking out the Carmichael house too, and police cars coming and going. I was glad to get to my front door unaccosted.

  My mother opened the door to me before I had a chance to get my keys out.

  “We've been looking out the window watching for you,” she explained. “The children think all the activity is great fun.”

  Sure enough, the twins were having the time of their lives. Ma had set up their high chairs so they had a good view of the street. She'd provided them with drinks and biscuits, a baby version of dinner theater. While the babies were busy rubbernecking, she'd been tidying and vacuuming. My father abandoned Ma, my two sisters, and me when I was little. Somehow she brought the three of us up on nothing but debts—because that was what my father left us with—and completed a law degree in the bargain. My mother could write the book on multitasking.

  “They're all ghouls,” I said, as another car double-parked outside and a couple of middle-aged women got out.

  “Not at all,” Ma said. “Look what they're doing.”

  As she spoke, one of the women reached back inside and emerged with a bouquet of white roses. The two of them pushed their way through to the Carmichael house, and as the way cleared for them I saw that the pavement was now scattered with flowers and cards. The street was rapidly becoming a shrine.

  “My God,” I murmured, “just like Princess Diana.”

  “People liked Paula Carmichael,” Ma said sadly. “They respected her and she respected them. She was never smug. Now everyone's h
eartbroken. Look at the policeman, even he's sad. Why would she do that?”

  Fresh from the newsroom it was a new perspective for me to look at how sad the policeman looked, but my mother was right.

  “It's so depressing,” my mother said in a low voice. “If she couldn't bear to live, how can any of us?”

  I watched for a few more moments, turned away, then turned back again. This house was so small, I couldn't retreat to a tower and pretend that nothing was happening outside. For a good while yet the pavement outside the Carmichael house would be the arena and my house would be the grandstand.

  “I've got to get out of here,” I muttered.

  “I'm at Lorna's this evening,” she said wearily, “but come and have dinner with us.”

  And so it came to pass that my mother cooked us dinner. Which consisted of pouring drinks all around and ordering Indian takeout. The twins shared a plain naan, mashed chicken korma, and some spinach. Once they were asleep on the guest-room bed breathing garlicky little snores we reheated the rest. Ma spooned out three portions, one for me, one for her, one for Lorna.

  “Lorna's tired,” she said, handing me Lorna's plate. “I think she'll stay in her room.”

  Lorna's room is the most peaceful place I know. That night she had chamber music playing softly and the lights were dimmed. She glanced over as I entered, but she said nothing. She was lying on her bed. By this point in the day she is usually exhausted, but even when she sleeps the quality of her rest is poor.

  “You don't feel like joining us?” I asked gently. She smiled and shook her head of red-gold curls, gesturing that I should leave her plate on the table by her bed.

  “Busy day,” she said softly. Her voice was a contralto, surprisingly vibrant coming from her weary body.

  Often, we would eat together. Once the most sociable of people, Lorna's instinct was still to seek out human contact even if it drained her of the last ounce of energy, which it always did. A year earlier, when the CFS was at its worst, I sometimes had to carry her to bed, and when I did I always remembered my mother scolding a seven-year-old Lorna for picking me up, three years younger, three years smaller, and swinging me around and then dropping me hard on the floor.